Online or electronic security is a major issue in the industry. It seems a month does not go by without news of some major business having a security breach. Such breaches include government agencies, retail outlets, social media companies, and even major banks.
Whenever an enterprise believes that a secure fix to remedy a breach has been deployed, hackers quickly figure out a new way to breach their systems. In some cases, the breaches are not even within the systems of the enterprise; rather, the breaches can occur over network transmission lines that enter or exit the enterprise systems; the hackers use sniffing techniques to acquire copies of data packets being transmitted over the network lines and find a way to break any encryption being used (assuming encryption was being used).
Even when an enterprise is capable of reasonably securing intra-device communications (communications between integrated devices within a composite device), large enterprises still face significant management issues of their entire fleet of devices.
For example, consider a retailer having multiple retail stores across the country. Each retail store includes multiple Point-Of-Sale (POS) terminals and each POS terminal includes multiple integrated devices, such as scanners, card readers, printers, etc. Even if the retailer is reasonably comfortable with secure communications within each POS terminal (e.g., scanner communication to a main processing unit of a POS terminal), the retailer may have difficulty in ensuring that it is obtaining adequate metrics and event messages at its backend centralized server for all of its POS terminals. This is so because any inter-device communication is exposed to the network and the network may have its own set of security issues, some of which may not even be entirely controlled by the retailer (network may be maintained by a third-party provider).
Therefore, there is a need for improving security associated with inter-device communications where those communications are exposed over one or more networks.